Sidsel Endresen has been at the forefront of the Norwegian music-scene for more than two decades. Her work has spanned genres from jazz-fusion and jazz-rock in the 80’s to free-improvisation and electronics. Sidsel has performed with Norwegian and international big bands, choirs and symphonic orchestras, worked within multi-media performances, theatre and dance and collaborated with various Norwegian poets. In international media she has been labelled La Grande Dame of the Nordic poetic chamber-jazz, although she does not consider herself a jazz-singer in the strict sense of the term. Endresen has always moved in new directions constantly renewing her music and her approach to the traditional role and function of the singer. She has worked extensively with her voice as an instrument and has developed a distinctive vocal improvisational style with abstract, phonetic language based on her exploration of the pure sound-aspect of the human voice. Endresen is today considered a major influence on a whole new generation of singers. (edit from the Institute for living voice website)

The Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær is one of the best innovative musicians on the contemporary jazz scene. His compositions are the fascinating mélange of styles that change between ominous ambient sounds and hard breakbeat, along which atonal screeching sounds of guitars and spacey sound effects are combined with melancholic melodies of deep intensity. Molvær’s début album Khmer from 1997 is probably the most unusual ECM album released in the ’90s, because Molvær’s music is not eschewing the record label’s typical musical aesthetics well-known for elevated chamber-jazz. With his Khmer EP he “subverted the traditions of Europe’s most revered jazz label by the sheer force and beauty of his music, to produce an album of bold organic-electronica, recasting the spirit of Miles Davis’ ‘Bitches Brew’ for a new jazz generation and a new century.” (edit from Molvær’s website). He has recorded 8 solo albums since, for more info follow this link.

The Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset is an inventor and creator of extrovert sound tapestries and generates almost spheric clouds of energy with the help of his instruments, variable effect pedals and a computer. Besides working with his own band “The Sonic Codex Orchestra” Aarset has also worked in the bands of Nils Petter Molvaer and Bugge Weseltoft and can be heard on their most important works as a master of the musical texture and, as he puts it eloquently, a “traditional non-traditionalist”. Carina Prange talked to Eivind Aarset for Jazzdimensions.

C.P.: A general question to start with: soundscapes, energy, melody, texture … which role do these aspects have in your music? Do you have a personal definition for them?
E.A.: Well, if you add harmony as well, I guess these are the building blocks I use when I make music. Soundscape and texture are parts of the same thing for me. It is the sensual perception of the music, the physical presence. Energy is what the music needs to come alive. I love good melodies, but I can also easily enjoy music without any obvious melodies. This is probably reflected in my music: sometimes melodies are very important and sometimes not that important. Texture and energy, at the other hand, are always important.

C.P.: In one of your interviews you mentioned that you see yourself in the group of people who are not going with the established, traditional sound of the electric guitar. Are there fellow non-traditionalist guitarists you feel related to?
E.A: I think everybody is inspired by someone or something and have their set of references. And in that sense everybody are traditionalists. But I guess in a classic “jazz” sense I am still a non-traditionalist. I feel more related and inspired by guitar players like Pete Cosey, David Torn, Nels Cline, Adrian Belew, Christian Fennesz, Hilmar Jensson or Daniel Lanois than by more conventional jazz players.

C.P.: When does the non-traditional start to become a tradition?
E.A: As I said earlier, I think no one is outside a tradition and I don’t mind that at all. But it is the museum approach to music that doesn’t appeal to me. I think it is boring when music becomes a set of rules what is correct and what is not and the aim is becoming something like how to sound like, for instance Miles, James Brown or Hendrix … Well I am sure you can learn a lot from it, but personally I think the original will always sound better! I read somewhere that Gustav Mahler once said that “Tradition is the passing on of fire and not the adoration of ashes.” (edit from Jazzdimensions)

Michael Wolf’s Tokyo Compression focuses on the craziness of Tokyo’s underground system. For his shots he has chosen a location which relentlessly provides his camera with new pictures minute per minute. Every day thousands and thousands of people enter this subsurface hell for two or more hours, constrained between glass, steel and other people who roll to their place of work and back home beneath the city. In Michael Wolf’s pictures we look into countless human faces, all trying to sustain this evident madness in their own way. ( … ) Michael Wolf discovered the subway system as suitable place in order to investigate mental state and aggregate condition of the city people. Wolf leaves out all accessories, focuses just on faces and figures. With his radical aesthetics he creates enormously intensive pictures, that in a distressing, yes shocking manner directly aim into the passengers thoughts and feelings. ( edit from 25books.com )

Using Antony Gormley’s sculptures from Event Horizon in NYC, this series of abstract visuals center on the camera gazing at the casted sculptures, who are in essence gazing at us, space or at each other. It’s as if they are communicating with each other within an architectural space which could be seen as both a real and surreal world.